Aug 232017
 

I’ve had another short story published in an anthology! It is “Through The Never” in Humans Wanted.

I liked the theme for this one. Basically that humans have a super-power. It’s something we just consider a normal part of being human, but it’s actually really rare and incredibly useful. Pick a trait, write a story about it!

I’d already been thinking about Lovecraft’s views on existential horror for a bit when I ran across this prompt. As much as I love Lovecraft, I find his opinions on what drives mankind insane kinda silly. Subsequent works and role-playing games have sometimes tried to hand-wave this by invoking a supernatural insanity-causing magic, but it’s pretty clear from his writings that Lovecraft just thought people are psychologically fragile things waiting for anything that challenges their understanding of reality to shatter their minds.

The thing is, he SHOULD be right. To realize that nothing we do matters, that time will erase everything we are and everything we care for, and the universe is so vast and uncaring that all our striving and flailing amounts to little more than a wobble in the quantum foam should be shattering. The vast apathy of the unstoppable forces that rule our lives and could snuff out our lives, or all life, in an instant, are so irredeemably unjust and overwhelming that it’s impossible to think why we should go on. Even screaming in defiance is lol-worthy, the only reasonable response is to simply give up. Or, possibly, to go absolutely insane.

That was Lovecraft’s view. That the only sane reaction to such a universe is insanity. That anyone who could put this all together in their minds would lose it. He said

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I think I agree with him. But he’s empirically wrong. Basically all of human society, at least in the developed world, realizes the truth of our existential horror universe. And we just keep going. We ignore it, or we drink too much, or we take lots of antidepressants and go to therapy, or we create epic animated series dedicated to exploring our angst at living in this world with a lot of fart jokes thrown in. But we go on anyway. We are *far* more mentally robust than Lovecraft gave us credit for.

Looking at this from the outside, though, makes us seem insane. In an insane world, the sane die out, and only the insane can survive. How better to explain our ability to shrug at all this and just keep on popping out kids and plowing forward? We’re all nuts.

So–take as our superpower our pre-existing insanity that lets us shrug at daily existential horror. Throw in some Tegmark Level infinite universes and contagious memetic hazard, and you have “Through The Never”. :)

  2 Responses to “New Short Story – “Through The Never””

  1. Got the book and read the opening as well as your story. Its good, one of your best so far I think.

    I’m also excited to read some of the other stories in the anthology and see what other writers have done with the idea. I’ll probably make another comment once I’ve read a few more.

  2. I’ve read a humanity is awesome thing a while ago which were just short (really short, like 1-2 pages) stories about humans sorta surprising aliens by mostly winning in some war by doing human things (like being creative or by being a species that warred amongst itself for thousands of years or bluffing or stuff like that). This sounds a bit like that although I think it might not be so focused on military victories. :-)

    ..search search..

    http://imgur.com/gallery/w3nA4 That was it. :-)

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